The cut scene of going up/down the elevators is there to hide the "Now Loading" screen.
No it's not. The cut scene is there because every other Metroid game (except Metroid 2) seperated the different sections of the world by elevators.
Granted, the game is loading during the cutscenses (you can tell by the sounds from the disc drive), but they probably could've avoided the cutscenes if they really wanted to. You'll notice that there aren't many major major rooms in the game that aren't seperated by fairly empty hallways. Those hallways are there to kill time while the next room loads. If you morph into a ball and repeatedly use the speed boost, you can often make it to the next door before the loading finishes. You'll have to wait a few seconds before the door opens, whereas if you just walked across the room the door would've opened right when you got to it.
I haven't played any of the Metal Gear Solid games, but the every review I've read of the remake claims that Silicon Knights added into the game every improvement that MGS 2 had. Doing that required modifying the existing game to take into account your new abilities.
Let's look at it from the perspective of the company providing the support. Earlier in this thread it was established that writing the actual software involved is a very easy task. You have two business options here:
1) Write the software yourself, with vendor lock-in schemes included, and generate revenue off both support and upgrades. As your software is proprietary, once a customer starts using it, there aren't really any other options for support.
2) Provide support for an open source product. The fact that it is open source means that your customer can go to anyone else for support whenever they feel like it. That makes open source both a strength and a weakness to your company.
If you were an investor, which most likely means you really don't care if software is open source or not, which would you choose? I know I'd consider the first option to be a more lucrative business plan. If we were talking about software that takes a huge investment to create (say, a web browser), I'd be much more likely to go with the second choice.
Before the GBA game out, Nintendo did various demos to show the screen quality of the GBA. Those demos included showing two N64 games - Yoshi's Island and Rogue Squadron - on the GBA screen. People misinterpreted this to mean the GBA could play N64 quality games. It's probably the same deal here.
Read the story. Nintendo currently has the production lines at maximum capacity. It just takes time to make the systems and ship them from Japan to the US.
Nintendo always has problems figuring out the right levels to produce things at.
The GameCube significantly outsold the Xbox in the US at launch, but Nintendo was unable to provide more systems for months. This enabled the Xbox to surpass the GameCube in US sales, where it has stayed since.
If you didn't preorder Smash Bros when it was released, odds are you weren't getting it for a few months. I know it was the same story with Ocarina of Time back in the N64 days. Nintendo's holiday games generally don't get a second shipment until February/March.
They aren't saying that January's sales were higher than average sales or anything like that. They said that this past January there was a huge increase in GameCube sales compared to the previous January.
Microsoft and Sony are both showing decling system sales. Nintendo is the only one who's sales are inreasing.
Because the effects of changing a few polygons is much easier to run thru QA than the effects of changing the properties of one of the most important player abilities.
Metroid Prime wasn't designed for you to be able to get major items out of order. The only way to do it is by taking advantage of glitches in the game.
One example is bomb jumping - you can't just keep dropping bombs. After setting 3 off, you have to wait for the 3 bombs to regen before you can set more. But there's a glitch along the lines of pausing after setting off the first one, which lets you get 5 off in a short time. It lets you bomb jump slightly higher, and lets you reach the areas that were supposed to be just out of reach of bomb jumping. In the PAL version, some of those ledges were made slightly higher so that this trick wouldn't work.
The other major glitch is in wall design. Most of the walls have rocky surfaces. A lot of them unintentionally had polygons meet in such a way that if you jumped perfectly onto a certain part, you could stand there and then jump again to reach things you shouldn't be able to. A few of those polygons may have been altered in the PAL version to prevent those jumps.
The GameCube sells at the same price as the GBA SP, but the games sell for $20 more ($50 vs $30), and the GameCube games have significantly lower manufacturing costs. The games are always where the real profit is.
The only way you can consider the N64 a failure is by defining success as selling more consoles than anyone else.
The N64 outsold the PlayStation significantly during the first half of that generation. In the second half, N64 sales died off and PlayStation sales soared. In the end, altho the PlayStation outsold the N64, the N64's sales were about equal to that of the SNES, which is nothing to complain about. Throughout the entire generation, Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party games sold extremely well, resulting in Nintendo's profits being higher than Sony (games division) and Sega's combined.
The GameCube is not falling behind the Xbox - it's always been ahead in the global picture, and has been gaining ground rapidly in the US for the past several months. All console manufacturers are constantly changing the amount of consoles they produce, it's just usually not announced. And anyway, the GameCube is still very profitable, which is all Nintendo cares about. They don't see a need to go all out to be #1 if they can make a nice amount of money as #2.
Well, the problem with too many designers is simply that almost anyone that's ever played a game feels they could design their own great game. I'm sure you know at least a few people that played a few Mega Man games and then came up their own ideas for Mega Man bosses. Heck, the bosses in the last few NES Mega Man cames were all entries submitted into a design a boss contest.
There are plenty of game programmers too. Look around at the console homebrew development websites. Plenty of programmers there.
What's really lacking is artists. You generally need a huge amount of artwork for a given game, and you need talented artists for a game. Someone who simply knows how to use Photoshop filters won't cut it.
The worst part of doing a homebrew game is finding people to do the art. Very few artists are willing to get involved in a project without money up front, and those that do are often hard to keep motivated enough to get things done.
The comment was on compile time when a major header is changed. Things like if someone at Microsoft needs to make a change to windows.h, that's going to cause everyone to have to do a lot of recompiling. You can't avoid that.
Function inlining is a hit or miss thing. You get less cache misses because you don't have to jump to another memory address, but at the same time you get more cache misses because your code as a whole is significantly larger.
If you look at the narrow area of code surrounding the inlined function, performance increases. When you start widening the scope, its not so clear if the performance is better or not.
I agree - the shape of the tails is terrible. They aren't contoured. Sony definately needs to model the tails more like the tails of Nintendo controllers, which have curves to fit your hand.
GameCube hasn't escaped copied discs because of the disc size. GameCube discs have a barcode stamped on them, just before the data starts. If that barcode isn't valid, the system will not register a disc being present. The bar code can only be put onto the disc during manufacturing, meaning the only way to pirate GameCube discs is to have a factory to mass produce them.
The barcode is part of the DVD standard, but no one else uses it. That's really all that's necessary to stop the copying.
Games loaded like that barely work. Most games either can't save to the memory card, and/or have sound problems. The load times are also significantly slower (yes, the network is theoretically faster than the optical drive, but the games weren't designed to run like this. it's a poorly done hack)
N64->GCN: lost an easily-reachable digital control pad. Playing Tetris on a GameCube is a bitch and a half.
The problem with the GCN dpad isn't the position of it, but rather the fact that the dpad rests in an indent in the plastic. That makes it very hard to use the dpad with precision.
The N64's dpad was bad because you couldn't reach the dpad and the analog stick simultaneously (unless you were one of those weirdos that grabbed the controller by the outer prongs and reached across the whole thing to get at the stick). With the GameCube, you can switch between both easily.
If you only care about the dpad in a game, use a Hori pad. It's an officially licensed controller released in Japan. Order it from Play-Asia for about $20 shipped. It's great for 2D games, including the GB Player.
You've got really high tolerance for bad framerates if you think Doom on the GBA is fine. I'm not one to complain about frame rates, even in games known for bad frame rates (i.e. Perfect Dark), but Doom on GBA is my limit.
Duke 3D on the PC was designed for up to 640x480. There was incomplete support for up to 1024x768, but you usually ended up with glitchy graphics if you tried it. The GBA screen is 240x160. Both Doom and Wolf3D for GBA double each pixel horizontally, giving you an effective resolution of 120x160. Duke3D seems to go further than that; possibly doubling vertically as well. I haven't looked close enough to tell exactly why its so bad looking.
The GBA can run Quake I, but at an absolutely terrible framerate. The GBA CPU does not have a divide instruction, or floating point support, which really limits the amount of 3D you can do.
Also, ever play Doom or Duke 3D for GBA ? Doom has such a low framerate its nauseating. Duke 3D is so low resolution you can barely make anything out. Wolf3D is about the limits of the 3D the GBA can do comfortably.
Or even better, it describes Desks Overview on IRIX, circa 1995 or so. You could open a window that showed scaled down versions of every desktop you had open - around 100x100 pixels. You got gray boxes for each open window. One nice touch was you could drag and drop those gray boxes to windows around on the desktop or to another desktop.
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The cut scene of going up/down the elevators is there to hide the "Now Loading" screen.
No it's not. The cut scene is there because every other Metroid game (except Metroid 2) seperated the different sections of the world by elevators.
Granted, the game is loading during the cutscenses (you can tell by the sounds from the disc drive), but they probably could've avoided the cutscenes if they really wanted to. You'll notice that there aren't many major major rooms in the game that aren't seperated by fairly empty hallways. Those hallways are there to kill time while the next room loads. If you morph into a ball and repeatedly use the speed boost, you can often make it to the next door before the loading finishes. You'll have to wait a few seconds before the door opens, whereas if you just walked across the room the door would've opened right when you got to it.
I haven't played any of the Metal Gear Solid games, but the every review I've read of the remake claims that Silicon Knights added into the game every improvement that MGS 2 had. Doing that required modifying the existing game to take into account your new abilities.
Would an internal 4 Gig flash drive make everyone happy? Because that's not outside the realm of possibility yet.
Sure, that's possible theoretically. But not if the goal of removing the hard disk to is reduce the cost of the system.
Let's look at it from the perspective of the company providing the support. Earlier in this thread it was established that writing the actual software involved is a very easy task. You have two business options here:
1) Write the software yourself, with vendor lock-in schemes included, and generate revenue off both support and upgrades. As your software is proprietary, once a customer starts using it, there aren't really any other options for support.
2) Provide support for an open source product. The fact that it is open source means that your customer can go to anyone else for support whenever they feel like it. That makes open source both a strength and a weakness to your company.
If you were an investor, which most likely means you really don't care if software is open source or not, which would you choose? I know I'd consider the first option to be a more lucrative business plan. If we were talking about software that takes a huge investment to create (say, a web browser), I'd be much more likely to go with the second choice.
Before the GBA game out, Nintendo did various demos to show the screen quality of the GBA. Those demos included showing two N64 games - Yoshi's Island and Rogue Squadron - on the GBA screen. People misinterpreted this to mean the GBA could play N64 quality games. It's probably the same deal here.
Here's what you need - Lesbian Linux.
Provides the porn-get package manager to provide all your porn needs.
Read the story. Nintendo currently has the production lines at maximum capacity. It just takes time to make the systems and ship them from Japan to the US.
Nintendo always has problems figuring out the right levels to produce things at.
The GameCube significantly outsold the Xbox in the US at launch, but Nintendo was unable to provide more systems for months. This enabled the Xbox to surpass the GameCube in US sales, where it has stayed since.
If you didn't preorder Smash Bros when it was released, odds are you weren't getting it for a few months. I know it was the same story with Ocarina of Time back in the N64 days. Nintendo's holiday games generally don't get a second shipment until February/March.
They aren't saying that January's sales were higher than average sales or anything like that. They said that this past January there was a huge increase in GameCube sales compared to the previous January.
Microsoft and Sony are both showing decling system sales. Nintendo is the only one who's sales are inreasing.
Because the effects of changing a few polygons is much easier to run thru QA than the effects of changing the properties of one of the most important player abilities.
That was the only contest in the US. Capcom ran contests in Japan for about MegaMan 4 and on.
Metroid Prime wasn't designed for you to be able to get major items out of order. The only way to do it is by taking advantage of glitches in the game.
One example is bomb jumping - you can't just keep dropping bombs. After setting 3 off, you have to wait for the 3 bombs to regen before you can set more. But there's a glitch along the lines of pausing after setting off the first one, which lets you get 5 off in a short time. It lets you bomb jump slightly higher, and lets you reach the areas that were supposed to be just out of reach of bomb jumping. In the PAL version, some of those ledges were made slightly higher so that this trick wouldn't work.
The other major glitch is in wall design. Most of the walls have rocky surfaces. A lot of them unintentionally had polygons meet in such a way that if you jumped perfectly onto a certain part, you could stand there and then jump again to reach things you shouldn't be able to. A few of those polygons may have been altered in the PAL version to prevent those jumps.
The previous poster listed 15% items without the ice beam. Your method would require getting the ice beam in order to skip the speed booster.
The GameCube sells at the same price as the GBA SP, but the games sell for $20 more ($50 vs $30), and the GameCube games have significantly lower manufacturing costs. The games are always where the real profit is.
The only way you can consider the N64 a failure is by defining success as selling more consoles than anyone else.
The N64 outsold the PlayStation significantly during the first half of that generation. In the second half, N64 sales died off and PlayStation sales soared. In the end, altho the PlayStation outsold the N64, the N64's sales were about equal to that of the SNES, which is nothing to complain about. Throughout the entire generation, Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party games sold extremely well, resulting in Nintendo's profits being higher than Sony (games division) and Sega's combined.
The GameCube is not falling behind the Xbox - it's always been ahead in the global picture, and has been gaining ground rapidly in the US for the past several months. All console manufacturers are constantly changing the amount of consoles they produce, it's just usually not announced. And anyway, the GameCube is still very profitable, which is all Nintendo cares about. They don't see a need to go all out to be #1 if they can make a nice amount of money as #2.
Well, the problem with too many designers is simply that almost anyone that's ever played a game feels they could design their own great game. I'm sure you know at least a few people that played a few Mega Man games and then came up their own ideas for Mega Man bosses. Heck, the bosses in the last few NES Mega Man cames were all entries submitted into a design a boss contest.
There are plenty of game programmers too. Look around at the console homebrew development websites. Plenty of programmers there.
What's really lacking is artists. You generally need a huge amount of artwork for a given game, and you need talented artists for a game. Someone who simply knows how to use Photoshop filters won't cut it.
The worst part of doing a homebrew game is finding people to do the art. Very few artists are willing to get involved in a project without money up front, and those that do are often hard to keep motivated enough to get things done.
The comment was on compile time when a major header is changed. Things like if someone at Microsoft needs to make a change to windows.h, that's going to cause everyone to have to do a lot of recompiling. You can't avoid that.
Function inlining is a hit or miss thing. You get less cache misses because you don't have to jump to another memory address, but at the same time you get more cache misses because your code as a whole is significantly larger.
If you look at the narrow area of code surrounding the inlined function, performance increases. When you start widening the scope, its not so clear if the performance is better or not.
I agree - the shape of the tails is terrible. They aren't contoured. Sony definately needs to model the tails more like the tails of Nintendo controllers, which have curves to fit your hand.
GameCube hasn't escaped copied discs because of the disc size. GameCube discs have a barcode stamped on them, just before the data starts. If that barcode isn't valid, the system will not register a disc being present. The bar code can only be put onto the disc during manufacturing, meaning the only way to pirate GameCube discs is to have a factory to mass produce them.
The barcode is part of the DVD standard, but no one else uses it. That's really all that's necessary to stop the copying.
Games loaded like that barely work. Most games either can't save to the memory card, and/or have sound problems. The load times are also significantly slower (yes, the network is theoretically faster than the optical drive, but the games weren't designed to run like this. it's a poorly done hack)
N64->GCN: lost an easily-reachable digital control pad. Playing Tetris on a GameCube is a bitch and a half.
The problem with the GCN dpad isn't the position of it, but rather the fact that the dpad rests in an indent in the plastic. That makes it very hard to use the dpad with precision.
The N64's dpad was bad because you couldn't reach the dpad and the analog stick simultaneously (unless you were one of those weirdos that grabbed the controller by the outer prongs and reached across the whole thing to get at the stick). With the GameCube, you can switch between both easily.
If you only care about the dpad in a game, use a Hori pad. It's an officially licensed controller released in Japan. Order it from Play-Asia for about $20 shipped. It's great for 2D games, including the GB Player.
You've got really high tolerance for bad framerates if you think Doom on the GBA is fine. I'm not one to complain about frame rates, even in games known for bad frame rates (i.e. Perfect Dark), but Doom on GBA is my limit.
Duke 3D on the PC was designed for up to 640x480. There was incomplete support for up to 1024x768, but you usually ended up with glitchy graphics if you tried it. The GBA screen is 240x160. Both Doom and Wolf3D for GBA double each pixel horizontally, giving you an effective resolution of 120x160. Duke3D seems to go further than that; possibly doubling vertically as well. I haven't looked close enough to tell exactly why its so bad looking.
The GBA can run Quake I, but at an absolutely terrible framerate. The GBA CPU does not have a divide instruction, or floating point support, which really limits the amount of 3D you can do.
Also, ever play Doom or Duke 3D for GBA ? Doom has such a low framerate its nauseating. Duke 3D is so low resolution you can barely make anything out. Wolf3D is about the limits of the 3D the GBA can do comfortably.
Or even better, it describes Desks Overview on IRIX, circa 1995 or so. You could open a window that showed scaled down versions of every desktop you had open - around 100x100 pixels. You got gray boxes for each open window. One nice touch was you could drag and drop those gray boxes to windows around on the desktop or to another desktop.